Close your eyes and imagine this: It’s Saturday and you’re in the last hour of a four hour open house. No people have shown up. No people in sight either. You thought this would be one of those listings that would just fly off the market… eight weeks ago! Not to mention that one deal that fell through yesterday, two days before closing. You’ve got to do something!! All your marketing is not working…it seems like nothing is going your way. You’ve really got to do something!!!!…

Stop right there! That’s exactly the target market of every “lead” generation company in every industry. An ambitious professional that really needs to do something about their slow business. You go to their website, they promise good, fresh, solid, double verified, triple gold plated, leads. Actual customers just waiting in the sidelines for your call to go look at some homes. They’re already pre approved too. Look! On the website, Melanie is smiling after having closed millions of transactions using this very lead system. And its just $60 a lead; that’s two dollars a day. You can afford that. You spent more than that on coffee at Starbucks each day. What’s more the salesperson said that I should expect to convert about 15% of the leads. This could pay for itself for a whole year with just one deal.

Reality Check! Leads just don’t work! Think about it rationally like you had millions of dollars in the bank. What’s the source of these leads? How are they getting them? Oh that’s right, the customer went there to check how much their house was worth for free. Doesn’t that mean they want to sell? Uhm.. no! That means they were bored and saw this commercial on TV about a free value check and decided to give it a try. Moreover, think about this. If you had a system that could get you thousands of buyer and seller leads, wouldn’t you:

1. keep it to yourself
2. ditch the lead business and get into real estate?!

Lead companies don’t sell leads. They sell hope. And if you understand that you will understand why leads don’t work. Instead, think about what your customers are looking for and give it to them and you might just come up with your own system for generating actual organic leads that work.

From my Moguls in Progress Blog at

http://www.signaturehouston.com/blog-3.htm

After 27 years in the business, the last 10 working with the latest In Online marketing technology, I decided to write an eBook that would help Realtors realize the potential of THEIR OWN WEBSITE.

Paying these lead generating websites is expensive and unless you do alot of follow up and coddling you might as well park your car at the end of a street and knock on doors!

Every realtors website has the potential to do EXACTLY what the big boys are doing and if you want leads you can get them without paying for them from a third party, AND they can be higher quality leads because you control the qualifying.

I take tried and true methods of prospecting that have been done for years and apply them with todays technology. I also show the reader how to drive targeted traffic to your website and how to convert them into a customer.

Creative marketing ideas utilizing available technology to help earn you more revenue and save valuable time with some simple techniques.

It’s not that Realtors always do things the hard way, but that the entire industry has been slow to adapt to the new reality of the power of the internet for their business. I show agents in straight simple language how to monetize their websites and improve their professional image.

Also, has anyone found a REAL website optimizer that works?

One company you may want to look at is tollfreelive.com if your looking at a 800 listing service. This is a full featured virtual PBX that lends itself to this type of setup.

But, it’s getting tougher and tougher to do that. Lots of people jump into, then jump out of, being a Real Estate webmaster. You’d be surprised how often these guys skip.

Never hire any consultant without a recommendation.